Footwear

I like to give the boys choices in their clothing in an effort to avoid meltdowns when they don't want to wear what I've picked out. They will always go for the dinosaur shirt over anything else. And they wear sweatpants every day except for Sunday when I tell them they must wear "church clothes" (poor church gets such a bad wrap!). They are pretty easy to figure out. Except when it comes to their footwear. I realized the other day how out of hand it had gotten. I was shouting out the options and realized we simply had too many choices. Here's what I said: "Do you want to wear your boots, old tennies, new tennies, Crocs or sandals?" Too much! The funny thing is that I can never predict what sort of footwear mood they will be in that day. And they've even discovered my stash of hand-me-down shoes in the closet and have taken to dragging out even more shoes and sandals every day. Here are the boys sporting their rainboots:


You'll notice that Samuel still has the string connecting his left and right boot. Don't even THINK about cutting that string! I ask every day if he wants me to cut it and he insists he needs it. That way one doesn't get lost and he knows which boot goes on which foot. Duh!
These are the new tennis shoes the boys got last week. They look so grown up in them! Samuel wears a size 8 and Joel a size 6.


And here's the basket at the backdoor that contains their many footwear options:

And in interest of full disclosure, this is what the area usually looks like (in fact, what it DID look like before I cleaned it up to take the picture):

I show this last picture as a laugh about "The Groanings of Elkanah" or "The Secret Prayers of Hannah" - the spoof blog that my husband keeps threatening to write. I think you all know that I write on a parenting blog called Prayer of Hannah. Everytime something happens at home that isn't quite how I portray myself on POH, Ed threatens to post a picture on the spoof blog. (Picture a kitchen full of dirty dishes, me yelling at my kids, me sitting on the computer instead of playing with my kids, etc). So that pics for you, babe!